Sunday, February 03, 2013

WONG SHUN LEUNG: Wing Chun Personified

Trained by the late grandmaster
Yip Man, teacher to the great Bruce Lee, Wong Shun Leung is perhaps
best-known as the wing chun man who routinely challenged anyone of any
style and lived to tell about it.

by David Peterson

*** The
following article was previously published within the pages of “Inside
Kung-Fu” magazine (Vol.18/No.2) as ‘Wong Shun Leung: Wing Chun’s Living
Legend’. It is reproduced here in its original form as a tribute to Sifu
Wong, who passed away on January 28th 1997 - the Author. ***

Hong Kong-based Wing Chun instructor, Wong Shun Leung, has been
called many things by people in the martial arts world.
England’s ‘Fighters’ magazine called him, “…a communicator and
teacher of Wing Chun par excellence”; Jesse Glover, the first
American student of the late Bruce Lee, wrote in his book
‘Bruce Lee’s Non-Classical Gung Fu’ that Wong Shun Leung “…is
one of the greatest Wing Chun teachers in the world”; Bey
Logan, editor of the British martial arts magazine ‘Combat’
wrote that “…Wong Shun Leung is far more important as a Wing
Chun teacher in his own right than just a figure in the life of
Bruce Lee. He deserves better than to be in anyone’s shadow”; America’s
‘Black Belt’ magazine simply called him “…a Wing Chun
phenomenon.”

Which ever way you want to look at it, there is no denying that Wong
Shun Leung is possibly the greatest living representative of
the dynamic Chinese fighting art of Wing Chun, the man who put
Wing Chun on the map in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties in
his well publicised challenge matches against representatives
of all the major combat arts in Hong Kong. He is the man who
can rightly claim to have been the late Bruce Lee’s teacher,
and to have influenced the development of Lee’s personal art of
combat, Jeet Kune Do. His ego is such, however, that Wong Shun Leung
prefers to be known simply as a teacher, a sifu, and he refuses
to accept accolades such as “master” or “grandmaster”, terms
which he believes are worthless because they have been abused so
readily in recent years.

Wong Sifu, in his own typical fashion, usually downplays his “deadly”
image by stating that, “I can’t fight very well and my Kung Fu
is not very good.” He decries the claims of other so-called
“masters” by emphasising that it matters not whether one is the
son of a grandmaster, or that one knows “every deadly move
known to man.” In his opinion it is far more important that one
must practise hard, to “become the master of the art, not its
slave.” To Wong Sifu it makes no difference how senior you are,
but how good you are. He considers that Wing Chun is a SKILL,
not an ART, and he sees nothing wrong with using ones skills.

In comparing skills and art, Wong Sifu has been quoted as saying,
“…if A and B have a fight and B gets knocked out, then everyone
knows that A won. There’s a winner and a loser. However, in
music, you can like someone’s guitar playing or not like it and
it doesn’t matter. Because it’s an ART, you can’t PROVE that
one painting or piece of music is better than another. However,
in Kung Fu, you can prove your skill in such a way that there
is no doubt! This is the difference….in other ARTS, beauty may be in
the eye of the beholder, but in MARTIAL ART, the only judgement is
whether or not it works!” Statements such as this one are
characteristic of the very down-to-earth approach that Wong
Sifu has to combat, and he certainly has the fighting record to
back up such a beliefs.

Wong Shun Leung began his training in the martial arts while in his
early teens. He tried his hand at several styles, including
Western boxing, in which he developed a real interest, an
interest which he still maintains today. Wong Sifu considers
boxing to be very practical for the street because boxers learn
to give and take punishment right from the word go,
concentrating on attacking instead of “chasing the opponent’s hands”
like many of the classical Kung Fu styles do. He probably would
have still been boxing now if it hadn’t been for two particular
incidents which changed his approach to combat once and for
all.

Firstly, while sparring with his boxing coach one afternoon, Wong
accidently landed a damaging blow to the face. In a rage, the
coach began pounding Wong until, bleeding from nose and mouth,
Wong managed to gain the upper hand, eventually knocking his
coach out cold. After this event, Wong lost all respect for his
boxing coach and never went back for another lesson. Wong’s
father and grandfather had both been doctors of traditional Chinese
medicine and were well acquainted with members of Hong Kong’s
martial arts community so that from a very early age, Wong had
heard hundreds of tales of the exploits of various local
heroes. His grandfather had even been a good friend of Chan Wa
Sun, the first of his future instructor Yip Man’s Wing Chun
teachers, so Wong was aware of the fighting art of Chan the
“money-changer” (Jau Chin Wa) from Fatsaan.

Wong recalled some of the stories he had been told about Chan Wa Sun,
and of Chan’s teacher, the legendary Fatsaan Jan Sinsaang
(Dr.Leung Jan, a noted herbalist in the nineteenth century,
renowned for his unrivalled fighting skills) and he decided to
seek out a Wing Chun teacher to see what the system had to
offer him. As it turned out, friends of his older brother were
learning Wing Chun so it was arranged that he would go to see
them train. To cut a long story short, Wong ended up having a match
with the man who was to become his teacher, the late grandmaster
Yip Man, after initially having “held his own” with a couple of
the junior students at the school, and was very soundly
beaten. From that moment onwards, Wong Shun Leung became a
devoted member of the Wing Chun clan and within a year had
single-handedly elevated the Wing Chun system from the position
of an obscure, virtually unknown, southern Chinese martial
art, to that of a real force to be reckoned with.

Now 55 years old, Wong Shun Leung has been involved in Wing Chun for
over 38 years, constantly working to develop and pass on the
skills of the system to literally thousands of students. These
days he spends at least three months of every year travelling
to various places around the world, spreading his
interpretation of Wing Chun in an honest, effective and
realistic manner. Wong Sifu is a realist when it comes to combat,
advising his audiences that martial artists are not invincible, and
that sometimes the best solution when surrounded by villains is
“…run away!” It is foolhardy, he suggests, to believe that
training in the martial arts will enable a person to dispose of
a group of attackers without raising as much as a sweat.
“If someone practises any martial art,” says Wong, “then
that person must become stronger and more durable than someone who
hasn’t practised. So if you are punched you are able to take a
lot more punishment than a normal person. I have been hit many
times, as have all of the great martial artists that I know of.
So we are not supermen, but we can take a lot more. Any
martial artist who says that he does not get hit is lying to
himself!”

To him, fighting is like a game of chess; just as one cannot expect
to win a game of chess without firstly sacrificing one or more
pieces, so one cannot expect to be victorious in a fight
without sustaining some kind of injury, even if only a few
bruises. Several jagged scars on his knuckles, as well as scars
from a knife on his arm and forehead attest to this belief.
When it comes to combat experience, Wong Shun Leung could tell
many tales, but with his usual modesty he tends to downplay this
aspect of his career in martial arts.
It is a well-known fact in Hong Kong, however, that from around the
time Wong Sifu was 18 until about the age of 24, he took part
in countless challenge matches (referred to in Cantonese as bei
mo) against fighters from virtually every style of martial art
in the colony. Bruce Lee credited Wong with hundreds of
victories, but conservative estimates suggest something along
the lines of at least 50 to 60 such matches, with Wong always emerging
as the winner. So successful was he that the local Hong Kong
press picked up on his exploits and one enterprising reporter
(now a resident in Australia) actually went out and arranged
fights for him against non-Chinese as well, including a 250lb
Russian boxer named Giko!

In the press reports Wong became known as Gong Sau Wong, meaning the
“King of the Challenge Fight,” the sound wong meaning both
“king” as well as being the same as his surname (although a
different written character). The term gong sau was actually
coined by Wong during an interview conducted at the time and
means literally “talking with the hands,” a very apt
description of exactly what he did. When pressed about these
matches while being interviewed in Australia two years ago, Wong Sifu
responded by saying, “I didn’t actually learn Wing Chun just to
go out and fight. Kung Fu should really be used as a way of
protecting yourself in circumstances where you are physically
threatened.

“After I learnt the skills of Wing Chun from Yip Man I often had
the opportunity to test them. By experimenting with my skills I
could discover their limitations and how they compared with
other disciplines and so improve myself. After a time of this
experimentation I learnt that I needed to rely less on the
fighting part to get that self-satisfaction and feeling of
achievement.” It was also during this period of experimentation
that Wong Shun Leung introduced Bruce Lee to the experience of the
challenge fight. In the first of Lee’s matches, Wong coached
him between rounds, encouraging Lee to continue when it seemed
that he was about to give up.

The result was a victory that possibly changed the course of Lee’s
life and certainly began the development of the martial arts
superstar whom the world was later to discover. Grandmaster Yip
Man, on hearing of the event, was said to have told Wong,
“Fortunately you accompanied him to the venue and encouraged
him to go on with the match. This trial of martial skill may be
a decisive influence on him in the future. If someday Bruce
Lee succeeds, the credit should rightfully go to you.” In discussing
this period in Lee’s life, Jesse Glover wrote, “Wong was four
years senior to Bruce in Yip Man’s clan and Bruce studied
privately for a year and a half under both him and Yip Man” and
that Wong was “…the man most responsible for the development
of Bruce Lee.” Glover also wrote, “In ’59 Bruce told me that
Wong was the greatest fighter in the Wing Chun style, and that
he had successfully defeated all challengers.”

Wong Shun Leung is not just a gifted fighter and excellent teacher,
he is also a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, and a
self-taught calligrapher whose writing is greatly prized by
those who appreciate such talent. He enjoys reading classical
Chinese poetry, eating fine food, sipping a glass of good
brandy with friends and sharing amusing anecdotes and jokes with
his students. Bey Logan, in his article ‘Bruce Lee’s Teacher’ wrote,
“The first thing you notice is how normal he looks. He looks
too short, too friendly to be the legendary Wong Shun Leung
Sifu. It is only the way he moves, the way he watches, that
reveals the nature of the discipline he has mastered.

“Next, you’re surprised by his keen sense of humour. Many Westerners
seem to cling to the idea that a Sifu must be a very old, very
solemn man. There is none of the stereotypical Master Po-figure
about Wong Shun Leung. He is very funny.” But as well as being
a very friendly, amusing and approachable man, Wong Sifu is
first and foremost an exponent and teacher of combat with quite
definite views on the purpose and function of Kung Fu. Being
the one student of Yip Man to have taught for him rather than
go out and open his own school, Wong was able to truly absorb all
that his teacher had to offer, the result being that he, above all
other pretenders to the throne, could rightfully claim to be
the inheritor of the system. Instead, Wong simply gets on with
the task of teaching, letting his skills and experiences speak
for themselves.

On the subject of self-defence, Wong says, “If you learn Kung Fu,
your purpose is to fight. If you can’t fight and win, how can you
defend yourself? Therefore, if you want to defend yourself, you
must train until you can overpower others.” In an article on
him which appeared in ‘Black Belt’ magazine, Wong said, “Wing
Chun Kung Fu is a very sophisticated weapon… nothing else. It
is a science of combat, the intent of which is the total
incapacitation of an opponent. It is straightforward, efficient
and deadly. If you’re looking to learn self-defence, don’t study Wing
Chun. It would be better for you to master the art of
invisibility.”

Strong opinions indeed, but then Wong Shun Leung bases such opinions
upon many years of experience in what could only be described
as real combat. He views many of the practices of modern
martial artists as little more than games. Although he realises
that the days of the challenge fight are well and truly over,
he looks upon their passing with an element of sadness, not
because he is an advocate of violence, but because today’s
generation of martial artists are missing out on realistic training, and
he sees the kinds of sparring exercises common to most styles
as being a poor substitute for the realities of street combat.

Wong Sifu is constantly warning his students against the dangers of
blindly following an instructor, copying every move he or she
makes and accepting everything that they say as gospel. “You
must become the master of your system, not its slave” is his
often repeated motto. Using art as an example yet again, Wong
Sifu says, “…Kung Fu is like painting a picture. When you learn
to paint from your teacher you cannot be exactly the same as
he or she because there are differences in age and experience,
and so there must be personal differences.

“A person’s nature and physique influences the way in which one
does things. Besides, if you do things exactly the same way your
teacher does them, you’re just copying, not expressing yourself
and will therefore not improve yourself.” He is not suggesting
by these words that the Wing Chun student should go out and
invent his or her own way of doing things. On the contrary,
Wong Sifu is a firm believer in passing on and practising the
skills of Wing Chun exactly as he himself learnt them. However,
he accepts the fact that all people are different, having different
levels of ability and so on, and therefore adopts the more
realistic approach of passing on the essence of Wing Chun in
the form of its concepts and basic principles with which the
students are then free to interpret and utilise in their own
particular way.

Wong Sifu also enjoys dispelling the many myths that shroud the
martial arts, myths that give martial arts a bad name and
detract from their credibility. “Martial artists are not people
who learn magical powers to become mystical monks like the
movies portray them to be. A lot of Kung Fu styles have in the
past lived off reputations of having some secret level that you
can eventually attain and, unfortunately, some instructors have
maintained these ridiculous ideas.” He cites an example from
his younger days when he was involved in a fight that had
erupted between a friend of his and another man.

He defeated the person in question and was about to leave the scene
when the guy, still lying on the ground, called out, “Hey
little fella, don’t go! I’ve already given you the dim mak
(death touch). You’re doomed!” Wong then adds, “That was around
thirty-five years ago and the dim mak hasn’t worked yet…”
Once, when asked by a journalist for an Australian magazine
about the existence or non-existence of dim mak techniques in
Wing Chun, Wong Sifu jokingly replied, “You might kill yourself
if you touch yourself,” and then in a slightly more serious tone,
“Besides, if a person is moving very fast, it’s almost impossible
to touch some small areas with such precision.”

Wong Shun Leung is indeed a rare breed of man. He doesn’t try to
exploit his reputation as one of Hong Kong’s most formidable
streetfighters, nor his influence on the career of the late
Bruce Lee. He doesn’t go around telling everyone how good he
is, nor does he run down other instructors and styles. Despite
his obvious skill he is not a pretentious man and his school in
Hong Kong is small and drab, containing none of the mod cons
found in most Western schools, just an excellent teacher who embodies
all the qualities one could ever hope for in an instructor.

He has dedicated his life to the advancement and understanding of
Wing Chun, “spreading the word” everywhere from Melbourne to
Munich, establishing schools wherever he goes, teaching anyone
willing to listen to what he has to say regardless of race,
colour or creed. Wong Sifu is the enemy of all who make false
claims about Kung Fu and the friend to everyone searching for
the truth about combat and themselves. He has been described as
“… an appropriate example of a man who has become his art and
vice-versa. He started as a gifted fighter, studied both the
physical and mental aspects of Wing Chun, and finally became Wing Chun
spiritually.

“He’s a man who can be either soft-spoken or out-spoken depending
upon the situation at hand. He has learned to understand his own
limitations and thereby the limitations of others. His
demeanour is calm, relaxed, and his intent unwavering. He is
philosophy without embellishment, like an old sword that
doesn’t appear dangerous at first, until you’ve tasted its
razor edge.” Wong Shun Leung Sifu is Wing Chun personified, a
living example of what can be achieved by anyone willing to devote all
their energy into the practice and understanding of their chosen
field of endeavour. The fact that he refuses to accept such
praise makes him all the more deserving of it. Why he has
achieved the level of expertise that he has is due to a very
simple philosophy:”My aim,” says Wong, “is to better myself
with each day of training.”

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